Why Managing Your Practice Costs you Time and Money
Journal Title: Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research (BJSTR) - Year 2017, Vol 1, Issue 2
Abstract
Everything is Broken The way we traditionally organize de-ntal practices is completely broken. Gallup says only 32% of staff are fully engaged; nearly 70% are phoning it in. A Harris poll shows that 51% of everyone in your practice is proactively looking for another job, right now. And worse yet, Harris says 81% would take some other job if it fell in their lap. We know it’s broken A Human Capital Trends recent survey of hundreds of leaders showed that “after years of struggling to drive employee engagement and retention, improve leadership, and build a meaningful culture, 92% of respondents rated redesigning the organization itself as a critical priority.” This new organization is “built around highly empowered teams, driven by a new model.” Will We Fix It? If any piece of technology like your hygienist’s scaling system, only functioned at 32%, would you put up with it? Of course not. Time is money, and you would never put up with the losses from something taking three times as long as it should. What would you do with that machine? Find out why. We don’t throw out a machine because it’s not working well. We do everything we can to find out why it’s not working. Repair and maintain diligently. Once we fixed the problem, we might find out that our maintenance wasn’t what it should be. A lot of failure is from lack of regular care and maintenance.You see where I’m going with this. We would never put up with a machine that functions at 32%, but when it comes to staff functioning that way, we just throw up our hands and say, “What are you going to do? Everybody has the same problem!” Except not everybody does. Some offices have 100% engagement, and if someone starts functioning below that, the team either gets them back up to speed (everybody has a bad day or week), or they get somebody else who wants to play at the highest levels. In some offices, deep competence and full engagement reign as the norm, and nothing else is acceptable. For these practices 32% engagement isn’t even on their radar. How do they do it? Spodak Dental Group in Delray Beach, Florida is one of our clients. Craig Spodak, DMD and his team have created a $12million single location practice that continues to grow in size and revenue, and most importantly, in legacy and positive impact on the surrounding Delray Beach community. We have attended their morning huddles. Everybody is participating, sharing kudos with each other, talking about the patients they are going to see that day, reviewing their financial numbers from yesterday and their forecasts for today, talking about special cases coming in that day so everyone can be sensitive. Working together, supporting each other, playing together outside work. There is full engagement, not 32%. And all of this happens without any managers. At Spodak Dental Group, nobody works for any one individual who can hire fire or tell people what to do. The teams hire the team’s fire. And the teams set other goals and objectives that would normally fall to the owner of the practice to set. In general, decisions are made where they are carried out, and the result is highly engaged, fully empowered staffs who understand that their future growth, income, and opportunities are all in their hands. The more initiative they take, the more opportunity is theirs going forward. The practice leader, (not manager – very different – she doesn’t tell anyone what to do) Erika Pusillo, started as a dental assistant years ago, and is now leading this amazing practice. And that frees up Dr. Spodak to be fully strategic, not managing the dayto- day, but asking himself and others great questions that guide them into the future. And he’s also free to practice exactly as much hands-on dentistry as he wants. He doesn’t have to do dentistry. He gets to; whenever he wants, and only the type of treatments he loves doing. This isn’t a dental industry thing. Companies of every size are leaving behind the outdated management practices of the Industrial Age to grow exponentially faster, with fewer staff. They’re doing it with what we call a Participation Age culture that results in increased stability, faster growth, more profitability, and much higher staff retention. In short, what is going on in the emerging work world, is a full on mission to rehumanize the workplace by giving everybody their brain back. And the result is 100% engagement and practice leaders who are free to lead, not manage. How Did We Get Here? The way we manage practices was inherited from the Factory System of the Industrial Age. That dehumanizing, top-down culture and those micro-managing business practices still dominate most companies. Dentistry is not an exception. Even though the focus of our company, Crankset Group, is helping dental practices rehumanize, we still get pulled into companies in other industries around the world, and we see it everywhere. Concepts like manager, employee, trading time for money, separating work and play, limited vacation time, an addiction to benefits, and other Industrial Age diseases still plague the business world, suppressing growth, profitability, and longevity.
Authors and Affiliations
Krista Valentine
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